Ernest Becker Part 2

Here are a few more quotes from Denial of Death by Ernest Becker regarding what it means to be neurotic:

"We call a man “neurotic” when his lie begins to show damaging effects on him or on people around him. Otherwise, we call the refusal of reality “normal” because it doesn’t occasion any visible problems. It is really as simple as that. After all, if someone who lives alone wants to get out of bed a half-dozen times to see if the door is really locked, or washes and dries his hands exactly three times every time or uses a half-roll of toilet tissue each time he relieves himself—there is really no human problem involved. These people are earning their safety in the face of the reality of creatureliness in relatively innocuous and untroublesome ways."

"But the whole thing becomes more complex when we see how the lies about reality begin to miscarry. Then we have to apply the label “neurotic.”"

"Generally speaking we call neurotic any life style that begins to constrict too much, that prevents free forward momentum, new choices, and growth that a person may want and need."

"It is one thing to ritually wash one’s hands three times; it is another to wash them until the hands bleed and one is in the bathroom most of the day. Here we see in pure culture, as it were, what is at stake in all human repression: the fear of life and death. Safety in the face of the real terror of creature existence is becoming a real problem for the person. He feels vulnerable—which is the truth! But he reacts too totally, too inflexibly. He fears going out in the street, or up in elevators, or into transportation of any kind. At this extreme it is as though the person says to himself "If I do anything at all…I will die.""

"We can see that the symptom is an attempt to live, an attempt to unblock action and keep the world safe. The fear of life and death is encapsulated in the symptom. If you feel vulnerable it is because you feel bad and inferior, not big or strong enough to face up to the terrors of the universe. You work out your need for perfection (bigness, invulnerability) in the symptom—say, hand washing or the avoidance of sex in marriage. We might say that the symptom represents the locus of the performance of heroism. No wonder that one cannot give it up: that would release all by itself the flood of terror that one is trying to deny and overcome. When you put all of your eggs in one basket you must clutch that basket for dear life. It is though one were to take the whole world and fuse it into a single object or single fear."

"The ironic thing about the narrowing-down of neurosis is that the person seeks to avoid death, but he does it by killing off so much of himself and so large a spectrum of his action-world that he is actually isolating and diminishing himself and becomes as though dead. There is just no way for the living creature to avoid life and death, and it is probably poetic justice that if he tries too hard to do so he destroys himself."

"Another way of looking at it is to say that the more totally one takes in the world as a problem, the more inferior or “bad” one is going to feel inside oneself. He can try to work out this “badness” by striving for perfection, and then the neurotic symptom becomes his “creative” work; or he can try to make himself perfect by means of his partner. But it is obvious to us that the only way to work on perfection is in the form of an objective work that is fully under your control and is perfectible in some real ways. Either you eat up yourself and others around you, trying for perfection; or you objectify that imperfection in a work, on which you then unleash your creative powers. In this sense, some kind of objective creativity is the only answer man has to the problem of life. In this way he satisfies nature, which asks that he live and act objectively as a vital animal plunging into the world; but he satisfies his own distinctive human nature because he plunges in on his own symbolic terms and not as a reflex of the world as given to mere physical sense experience. He takes in the world, makes a total problem out of it, then gives out a fashioned, human answer to that problem."

"From this point of view the difference between the artist and the neurotic seems to boil down largely to a question of talent. If the neurotic feels vulnerable in the face of the world he takes in, he reacts by criticizing himself to excess. He can’t endure himself or the isolation that his individuality plunges him into. On the other hand, he still needs himself to be the hero, still needs to earn immortality on the basis of his unique qualities, which means he still must glorify himself in some ways. But he can glorify himself only in fantasy, as he cannot fashion a creative work that speaks on his behalf by virtue of its objective perfection. He is caught in a vicious circle because he experiences the unreality of fantasied self-glorification. There is really no conviction possible for man unless it comes from others or from outside himself in some way—at least not for long."

"In this sense, what we call a creative gift is merely the social license to be obsessed. And what we call “cultural routine” is a similar license: the proletariat demands the obsession of work in order to keep from going crazy. I used to wonder how people could stand the really demonic activity of working behind those hellish ranges in hotel kitchens, the frantic whirl of waiting on a dozen tables at one time, the madness of the travel agent’s office at the height of the tourist season, or the torture of working with a jack-hammer all day on a hot summer street. The answer is so simple that it eludes us: the craziness of these activities is exactly that of the human condition. They are “right” for us because the alternative is natural desperation. The daily madness of these jobs is a repeated vaccination against the madness of the asylum."

“Psychology narrows the cause for personal unhappiness down to the person himself, and then he is stuck with himself. But we know the universal and general cause for personal badness, guilt, and inferiority is the natural world and the person’s relationship to it as a symbolic animal who must find a secure place in it. All the analysis in the world doesn’t allow the person to find out who he is and why he is here on earth, why he has to die, and how he can make his life a triumph.”

Back to the subject of Penn Gillette and his criticism of A.A. and the twelve steps: When Bill Wilson and Bob Smith started Alcoholics Anonymous, they shared Becker's insights regarding the inability of psychology to address the fundamental problem of alcoholism (or for that matter any other neurosis). Psychologists of that era were deeply frustrated with alcoholics. They understood that self-awareness was ineffective but they lacked the basic insight of Becker that any effective solution must be have a spiritual component or it is doomed to fail. More about this in my next blog entry.